Recently, I had the opportunity to do some social media for an event.  This was the first time that my only focus was on taking photos and posting to social media.  Where do you begin to even plan social media?

The event planners didn't really know where to start with social media, it was left up to me on how I wanted to do it.  So the first thing I did was go through event schedule and made a social media schedule based on what was going on when.  The event spanned over two and half days.  I broke down each session during the event and made sure I had the opportunity to visit each.  At some points in the schedule, it there was several sessions going on.  During those, I would stay for 5-10 minutes of each just to get a few key points to post.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you plan to do social media at your event.

Take lots of photos! People like to look at pictures more than they like to read things.  Make sure you take a lot of photos.  But the photos need to be interesting.  The one thing to remember about social media is that you want quick little tweets or posts that will get your audiences attention.  What I did at the event was take photos of the food so people would have a visual of what they were going to be eating.  I took photos of the worship services and posted snippets of the lyrics to the songs that were being played.  I also quoted some of the guest speakers when they had interesting points they were discussing.

Assign a couple people to the job. Social media is a big undertaking for one person. At first when you think about it, it doesn't seem like it would take very much time.  But that is where I made my mistake.  I figured that I could handle all of it on my own.  I was wrong.  Especially when I had to be in two places at one time.  It would have been nice to have a second person to help tag team the event.

Use both Twitter and Facebook. Not everyone uses Twitter and Facebook.  Make sure your organization has an account with both to reach all of your target audience.  In my case, most of the people at the event used Facebook, but I still tweeted to make sure I didn't miss any body.

Tomorrow, I will discuss the benefits that I saw from using social media during the event and explain how your event and organization can benefit from using social media.

How have you used social media at your event?